Confetti’s 2015 – A Retrospective

As the year winds to a close, we wanted to reflect on 2015, outline the exciting projects we worked on and thank all of you out there, who support us.

In the nearly seven years of Confetti’s existence, this was by far the most exciting, most successful and most colorful year (I know we said this the last two years, but it is true :-)).

This year we started a new tools department, grew again out of our office space while still having the challenge of finding more space, worked with the coolest projects in the industry and
established our office in Europe in Breda, Netherlands to serve our European customers better.

This is also the first year, where we can see the effect of what we call “third-generation” recommendations. We worked with a company in 2010, the person we worked with moved to the next company and recommended us and then from this company someone moved on and recommended us again to the third customer. Thanks for all the awesome recommendations!!

This year we helped to ship Transistor for iOS. This is an awesome game and we enjoyed working with the super nice and talented team of Supergiant Games a lot! Make sure to checkout the game!

We also helped to launch Vainglory on the Android platform in the first months of the year. If you like to play a MOBA on a mobile platform check it out. It was a joy to work with the super cool team at SuperEvil Mega Corp.

This year we also started a project with the famous German research center KIT in Karlsruhe. Our relationship with these guys goes way back to the founding of this company. Carsten Dachsbacher has always been a member of our advisory board. We are hoping to publish the project we worked on as open-source very soon. Not to spill the beans, but it has something to do with a next-gen rendering system; in other words more lights and many more shadows compared to current rendering systems.

One of the few remaining IPs that we haven’t worked on in the last seven years was Call of Duty. We were painfully aware of this until we got the chance to finally work on Call of Duty Black Ops III. Now we can say we worked on many or most of the big IPs in our industry

Since nearly seven years, Qualcomm is a great customer and this year like every other year we worked on a few interesting new projects with them. Supporting a “tinkering” hardware platform was one of them. We also returned to the Qualcomm offices in Bangalore and Hyderabad.

We are a middleware / consulting / service company for the game and movie industry. This year we worked with Red Giant on future real-time rendering high-quality post-processing effects for movie post production.

Our friends at Undead Labs are one of our returning customers. This year we helped them with various additions to their engine, including adding a new real-time skydome system with volumetric clouds.

Dolby Vision is the new HDR standard for TVs/ Monitors of the future. It is very impressive to see these new TVs/Monitors in action. We wrote the Dolby Vision SDK and now support various game developers and hardware vendors in implementing it.

Since nearly two years we work with Amazon Game Studios on their game engine. Creating new and especially next-gen technologies for many hardware platforms never fails to excite us

With the new rendering APIs available now, we are involved not only in designing those APIs in Microsoft’s Advisory Board and in the Khronos Group but also frequently implement them in game engines. We worked on various game engines this year on implementing Metal / iOS, DirectX 12 and Vulkan PC/Mobile.

We also worked on a wide range of new tech that we developed in-house, like for example a next-gen rendering system that removes the memory bandwidth overhead of filling G-Buffers from the rendering equation. Our middleware packages Aura, Ephemeris and PixelPuzzle evolved and are running even more efficiently on PC, PS4 and XBOX One. There is also a new middleware package at the horizon. Stay tuned for even more exciting stuff!

Many of our unannounced projects can’t make it into a retrospective like this. You guys know who you are! Thanks for working with us